For glampers, camping does not mean roughing it

RED WING, Minn. – Janet Ewert stepped out of her camper parked at Prairie Island Campground wearing a blue crochet hat with a pink flowered headband wrapped around it and vintage pins secured to one side.

Janet was one of a dozen women at Prairie Island who had renovated old campers using their crafty imaginations to make them glamorous. Because of their theme of being glamorous, the campers are nicknamed “glampers.”

Trips like the one to Prairie Island are about having a ladies’ weekend, sharing craft ideas and relishing the accomplishment of restoring, most of the time by themselves, an old camper that they get to enjoy a bit of freedom in.

“It’s kind of empowering as a woman,” Janet said as she sat next to her artfully placed tea set in her camper.

To be able to drive the big camper and park it, she said is empowering, but also to “tear these things down and put them back together and make them so darn cute,” is another.

For Carolyn Buckhardt, the empowerment came after putting a lot of elbow grease into her glamper, instead of asking her husband of 38 years to do it for her instead.

“Every component in here I not only did, I picked out,” ­Carolyn said. “It’s really me.”